1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a portable cooking appliance which can in particular be placed on a table and comprises a chamber constituting an oven and a cooking hotplate placed above said chamber.
An appliance of this type permits cooking or heating of food products either in the oven or on the top hotplate or simultaneously within the oven and on the hotplate.
This class of appliance has relatively small dimensions in order that it may be easily carried by one person and placed on a dining-room table where the guests themselves can supervise cooking of food.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In this general class, two different types of cooking appliance are already known.
In a first type, a single resistance-type heating element is provided for heating the interior of the oven chamber and the cooking hotplate. The major disadvantage of this type of appliance lies in the fact that heating of the oven cannot take place independently with respect to heating of the hotplate, and conversely. Furthermore, in this type of appliance, the position of the resistance heating element is necessarily ill-suited for optimum simultaneous heating of the oven chamber and of the hotplate.
In the second known type of appliance, two resistance heating elements are provided one element is located at the top of the appliance beneath the hotplate and the other element is located within the oven chamber. The heating power of these elements can be regulated separately by means of a thermostat, thus making it possible to obtain satisfactory heating of the hotplate and of the interior of the oven. However, the constructional design of an appliance of this type entails high capital expenditure and is consequently incompatible with that of a cooking appliance which must have relatively small dimensions in order to be portable.
Moreover, it is found that the bimetallic thermostats which are employed in low-price appliances give rise to a relatively high temperature-regulation differential, with the result that it is not possible to obtain within the interior of the oven a sufficiently constant temperature to ensure good conditions for cooking food products.
This disadvantage is all the more marked in the case of appliances having small-size oven chambers made of thin, low-cost materials since their low thermal inertia does not make it possible to compensate for the effects of a high temperature -regulation differential.